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Technical Diagrams

Developing Auckland's Rail Transport

Project DART is a $600million upgrade of the Auckland rail network being carried out by ONTRACK (the New Zealand Railways Corporation).

Once complete, these improvements will provide the more frequent and reliable services. These are significant infrastructure works involving regional and national government, businesses and residences, contractors, staff and media.

Acumen is well known for its simplicity of illustration design. We have produced construction staging diagrams which summarise the numerous and complex engineering drawings of the project for a much wider audience.

One of the key challenges is to maintain integrity of detail so the illustrations are credible with a diverse audience, suitable for engineers while being accessible also to the general public. Acumen use an approach that is 'proportionally disproportionate'. That is, location relationships between key items such as roads are exact — often drawn on top of high resolution aerial photos — but the details are shown to a much larger scale. This has been very important with railway lines because the rail corridor is so narrow and the details of tracks being upgraded would disappear on a normal scale map.